Previews

Skate

Real skateboarding takes skill, talent and a spare pair of knees, but are you ready for a videogame that is nearly as hard as the real thing?

Spiffy:

Detailed and nuanced control scheme; impressive list of skate stars; open design for free-form shredding.

Iffy:

Challenging learning curve; not as flashy in the trick department; character customization still mysterious.

Electronic Arts held a little get-together last Tuesday evening at which the gaming press was invited to partake in the company's first foray into the skateboarding genre the 1980's PC classic Skate or Die! Developed by the fledgling EA Black Box (based near Vancouver), I was particularly keen to see how the game was coming along after being somewhat disappointed with the latest Tony Hawk offering, Project 8. While still in a fairly early stage, I was most impressed by the direction that Black Box has taken the skating genre, focusing on freedom and creativity rather than single-button-instigated combo chains. Of course, all that freedom to create new and exciting ways to fracture an elbow doesn't come cheap, so you'll have to expect to spend some time actually learning how to skate in Skate.

When I was plunked down in a fairly barren (albeit magnificently rendered) skate park, I really got a sense of the open-ended philosophy behind Skate. There I was, in a big open area with a few different skate-able features to trick off of, but no set agenda. Granted, the finished game will undoubtedly offer a bit more direction, but the vast expanses of concrete flatland positively reeked of possibility. I was roused from my musings by the shocking fact that I wasn't moving. My skater was just standing there, ready to skate, but not actually going anywhere. Pushing on the analog sticks had no effect except to turn him around or make him lean. If this had been a Tony Hawk game, my guy would've already been racing around at breakneck speeds... what gave?

Push It Real Good

In its relentless pursuit of realism and accuracy, Black Box has made pushing a little more challenging by requiring you to actually press a button in order to get your skater going. The idea is that you need to be thinking about your feet all the time. Consequently, by pressing the A button you'll push with your right foot and by pressing X you'll push with your left. The longer you hold the buttons down the harder you push, so just rapidly mashing the A button gets you next to nothing in terms of speed. To achieve serious velocity, Skate demands an intriguing mix of rhythm and force; you need to hold the button long enough to get a nice good push, and you need to do it at regular intervals to maintain your speed. While this may sound disconcerting, in practice I found this feature served as a way to ground yourself in your skater's shoes, jacking your consciousness directly into a skating frame of mind. See, in Skate it's not as simple as hitting the Y button to grind, you've got to put some thought into what you want to do.

This theme is carried over into the execution of tricks, but here things seem a little simplified. If you want to do an ollie (the industry standard for getting air), you just hold back on the right analog stick and then quickly punch it forward. The right analog stick is an analog, so to speak, of your feet, so by pulling the stick backward, you shift your weight to the back of the board in preparation for an ollie. Then when you flick the stick forward, your skater will pop the board up with his back foot and slide his front foot forward to execute an honest-to-goodness ollie, just like a real skater would. I was informed by one of the devs shepherding me through the demo that these are not just canned animations, but actual physics calculations being done in real time, which is pretty staggering when you think about it.